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Miles Meth ’16 is amazed at the progress made by the Fight for $15 movement since its inception in the fall of 2012.

“Two or three years ago, a $15 minimum wage was like a bad joke in a board room,” says the anthropology major from Newton, Massachusetts. “But now, it’s a legitimate demand.” He cites a May 6 op-ed in the New York Times by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, “Fast-Food Workers Deserve a Raise,” in which the governor outlined an executive action that’s expected to bring the state’s minimum wage close to $15 an hour. “Two, three years ago,” says Meth, “he just wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Fight for $15 is a nationwide campaign, spearheaded by the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, which, according to the campaign’s website, demands “a $15 an hour” wage for fast-food workers “and the right to form a union without retaliation.”

The movement has been gathering steam, with cities such as Seattle, Oakland, Chicago, and Los Angeles, all adopting plans to raise the minimum wage for businesses operating in their borders to levels approaching, or at, $15 an hour.

Meth, a member of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, began working on the Fight for $15 campaign locally last fall, as an intern with the activist group Metro Justice. Working with the group’s organizing director, Colin O’Malley, Meth helped instruct fast-food workers in their legal rights and in political organization, and educate the broader public on the campaign within the context of the American labor movement.

Meth’s work with Metro Justice convinced him that Fight for $15 belonged at the top of SDS’s agenda. Accordingly, he adopted the role as official liaison between Metro Justice and Rochester’s SDS.

SDS, which is a national organization, has become one of the best-known student activist groups since its founding by University of Michigan students in the early 1960s. But the organization fizzled out in the late 1960s, and was revived as a chapter-based organization only in 2006.

At Rochester, SDS has been focused mostly on campus service workers. Over the past year, the group has supported an effort to include the ideas surrounding the Fight for $15 campaign in talks between some employees and the University’s administration.

Natajah Roberts ’14, who was a member of SDS as a student at Rochester, went on to become an organizer for SEIU after graduation.

Through the fall, she played a major role in the Fight for $15 campaign locally, as well as in the founding of BLACK, or Building Leadership and Community Knowledge (see article, p. 44). Roberts, now a community organizer for Citizen Action of New York, says her work for economic justice is inseparable from her work for racial justice, and vice versa.

“Racial injustice is tied to economic inequality, and more devastating even than income inequality for black people is wealth inequality,” she says.

Wealth refers to long-term investments such as homes, or funds to pay for college. Low-wage employment fuels both income and wealth inequality, but, Roberts notes, wealth inequality affects future generations, placing blacks ever further behind white counterparts.

In the days leading up to the Fight for $15’s nationwide strike day last December, SDS and Metro Justice worked together to expand the local base of support. In the spring, Metro Justice added another SDS member, Jordan Polcyn-Evans ’17, as liaison.

“This is an issue that very much affects the city,” says Polcyn- Evans, who grew up in Rochester.

And, he emphasizes, it affects the University’s own neighborhood. Fast-food establishments line Mt. Hope Avenue, including in College Town.

“We are so close to this issue. Literally, physically, so close,” he says.

On a second nationwide strike day, held on April 15, Polcyn-Evans addressed a rally of students, workers, and community supporters on the Eastman Quadrangle. In the days and weeks before, he and other members of SDS had secured the support of multiple campus organizations, including College Feminists, the Black Students’ Union, the Douglass Leadership House, and the Pride Network, and helped rally off-campus religious and community groups as well. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle estimated the crowd in the “hundreds.”

To be sure, not everyone on campus agrees with the movement’s goal. “I certainly butt heads with some students,” Meth says. “But overall, I’d say slowly but surely, the attitude has been shifting.”